AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings
21–30 of 405 posts
Re: AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings
#22I bet there are a bunch of people in upper management who hear about this phenomenon and think that employees are skipping meetings to slack off (appearing to do work but they're actually playing Mario Kart). In reality, it's more likely that they're being judged on their attendance of BS meetings, but if they attend the BS meetings, they won't be able to make the BS deadlines they're responsible for hitting. So they…
Having had been on both sides of this coin, I agree a lot of managers mis-manage meetings. But then there's those engineers who don't show up to meetings and then a month later come to you with a "I don't know how we're deciding on some of these critical product features" and I don't know how to tell them its because they skipped some meetings where they could've been part of that discussion.
Just tell ‘em that!
We had an internal RFC comment/discussion meeting on a proposed engineering standard. In that exact meeting, a dev flipped out and expressed exasperation that they weren’t asked to comment on the proposal. In the exact meeting that was one in a series of opportunities to comment on the proposal…
Re: AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings
#23> “We’re moving into a world where nothing will be forgotten,” Allie K. Miller
I am constantly amazed by allie K miller positioning herself as leader and visionary in every hot trend.
Re: AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings
#24I bet there are a bunch of people in upper management who hear about this phenomenon and think that employees are skipping meetings to slack off (appearing to do work but they're actually playing Mario Kart). In reality, it's more likely that they're being judged on their attendance of BS meetings, but if they attend the BS meetings, they won't be able to make the BS deadlines they're responsible for hitting. So they…
Having had been on both sides of this coin, I agree a lot of managers mis-manage meetings. But then there's those engineers who don't show up to meetings and then a month later come to you with a "I don't know how we're deciding on some of these critical product features" and I don't know how to tell them its because they skipped some meetings where they could've been part of that discussion.
100% this. As some who’s regularly derided by his colleagues for “hating meetings”: I don’t “keep meetings to a minimum”, I “keep meetings to a benefit”.
If I’ve called a meeting it’s because there’s a benefit to the instant vocal communication. If you’re not there, you’ve not attended the meeting, no matter which tools you use to record, transcribe or translate.
Conversely, if I thought I didn’t need to be in a meeting, then I wouldn’t send a tool to gather stuff for me to then just ignore the tool output - because I don’t need it.
These tools are a sign of cultural rot from both participants and the fact people are even making them shows deep flaws in how we communicate in the modern workplace.
Re: AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings
#25I feel this is a symptom of poor meetings, where they are used for information exchange (which I think should come before the meeting) instead of collaboration and problem solving. You could save your time and a bunch of AI-generated notes you'll never read with the simple rule of "no agenda, no attenda". Remote has allowed us to adopt meeting policies that would never exist in-person: giant, long, back-to-back sessi…
It's not a new problem. In a previous job long before remote, we had a 1.5 hour long biweekly meeting named "Team Meeting". No agenda, no goals, never went less than the full alloted time.
Re: AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings
#26On the other hand, I have great difficulty following who speaks what during an online meeting. I think that most people speech arent clearly transmitted, well as a justification looking the live caption, it also contains a lot of mistake
Re: AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings
#27You don't even need AI. Just a bot that waits until the end of the meeting and then says, "Nothing from me. Thanks everyone."
Re: AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings
#28Nothing says "this meeting should have been an email" like programmatically reducing it to plain text.
Re: AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having had been on both sides of this coin, I agree a lot of managers mis-manage meetings. But then there's those engineers who don't show up to meetings and then a month later come to you with a "I don't know how we're deciding on some of these critical product features" and I don't know how to tell them its because they skipped some meetings where they could've been part of that discussion.
Just tell ‘em that! We had an internal RFC comment/discussion meeting on a proposed engineering standard. In that exact meeting, a dev flipped out and expressed exasperation that they weren’t asked to comment on the proposal. In the exact meeting that was one in a series of opportunities to comment on the proposal…
Yes, this is pretty universal I think. Some people think software engineering in a team is writing code as much as possible, and doing anything else is bad.
Re: AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings
#30These apps are cancer. Otter.ai for example, by default, will scrape the call's contacts, and email every single one, saying they can access the notes if they sign-up. A 300 person meeting, their spam bot sends out 300 emails. Totally captive audience, and the person who installed the notetaker is often none the wiser that it happened.
Even if just one person installs it, it resets the iteration and can begin again.
Just like malware.